Slashdot Mirror
JBoss's Fleury Abjures Astroturfing
comforteagle writes "JBoss head honcho Marc Fleury has laid down the law about Astroturfing in the aftermath of being accused of the practice without actually admitting it was done. 'Our visibility and success puts our customers and partners in a situation where you expect and demand that employees of JBoss Inc. hold themselves to that higher standard. Let's put the professional back in professional open source. "Astroturfing" is hereby banned at JBoss, starting with me.'" jg21 writes "After the Slashdotting of the whole issue, the wider community took up the theme. LinuxWorld's editor in chief took to task those who sought to "pollute the knowledge space," and then Richard Öberg and Cameron Purdy took up the theme with a call to raise the cyber-bar when it coms to integrity. Now JBoss's CEO has recanted: there will be no more fake posts from JBoss staffers, he says. Hmm, time will tell."
I often sign myself 'Simon the cynic' when I read about personage X making some sweeping statement about how things are going to be - but for me it comes down to where the benefit is to be had. If there is no precedent or no perceivable advantage, my reaction is often (as the Poster's) "Yeah, right!".
In this case I have a (gut) feeling they're probably genuine. JBoss are up the proverbial creek - they're a commercial software house which relies on the same sort of markets as Open Source software, and they've just lost a lot of credibility. The only way out of it to them is to 'fess up, to publicly admit their wrongdoing, and pledge not to do it again. I'm also a firm believer in letting peoples actions decide my opinion of them - talk is after all cheap, especially in this digital age - and I believe in judging after the fact, not before. My regard for their (phenomenal) achievement dropped significantly when the story broke, but respect can be earnt over again. Let's see, indeed, but with an open mind.
Now that they *have* made a public pledge, and if they're caught again, it's game over in the reputation stakes. Anyone can make a mistake, and society usually forgives a single error of judgement - we generally expect people to learn, however. I think that this itself should be sufficient to keep them on the straight and narrow... Of course, this is just a different form of cynicism
I thought the idea that pollution of the information space was a "crime" in and of itself was an interesting point - I generally consider the net to be something of a cesspool, and it's not just cream that floats to the top... On the other hand, dive right in (yuck. Nasty mental image) and there's a lot on offer freely which would be otherwise hard to obtain. I wonder when (if) the balance will tip so there's more cream than crap.
Simon the cynic.
Physicists get Hadrons!
I'm more concerned with less intelligent companies who read this article and thought... Fake posts on the internet. What a great idea. While Astroturfing has always been around, mainstream articles about it are only going to give the un-enlightened new ideas.
of not getting caught..
You can find the memo where he outlined this to his employees here.
He was pretty nasty about getting caught.
Enron commits to never cook the books again!
I hate to start a war but I am not sure why would anyone use weblogic when JBOSS is such great J2EE container. I think Redhat, Suse should include JBOSS in AS market of their CD.
NOT!
Got Code?
...is hereby banned at Slashdot, starting with me.
Well, South African society set a standard for bad practices: tell all you wrong doings and "be forgiven" by the community.
I would like to know which postings are faked.
nosig today
Meet the new JBoss... Same as the old.
It was an economic benefit for them to astroturf.. and now that they've been caught it's an economic liability(not to mention sleazy and embarassing) and so of course now they promise to be as pure as the driven snow.. utter crap. Nothing here but greedy people changing there tune to whatever is most profitable, if you have a choice then don't support JBoss.
and my alter-ego missed it too...
on topic though, as unprofessional as the whole jboss has unfolded, it is really more noise in the jboss vs. the world open-source java community debate.
honestly no one will roll an app server into production based on comments on a web site without trying the product, getting under the hood, and seeing if it fits (and if you do let's hope we never cross paths). in the end the quality of the product will speak for itself, not the over zealous marketers (oss or commercial).
One of my favorite things to see in these forums is when some moron tries to market their product in this way and is immediately exposed. The resulting flames directed at the jackass provide some of the most entertaining reading you see on the internet. Makes my day every time.
Worst. Sig. Ever.
I thought Astroturf 0.9 was the new Mozilla browser.
-Dizzle
"I most likely AM so interested in myself."
For those of us who associate astroturf with football stadiums.
... really... Oooops! Here comes the boss!
[backspace][backspace][backspace][backspace]
Free Firefox news reader.
...I wonder if it drives him nuts when people call him Mark instead of Marc...
BTW, Rickard Oberg and Cameron Purdy posted the article on JDJ's site before linuxworld got to it...
Everybody dies.
That's quite a headline.
At first I thought "Fleury" might be some kind of wacko term for a PR position, like "ombudsman".
This space intentionally left blank.
This is a brief description of astroturfing. I honestly had no idea what the heck it was.
No, this isn't an attempt at karma-whoring. Don't mod me up if you think it is. I figured it'd be more helpful to Google it myself and post the definition then to post a stupid one-liner "WTF is astroturfing?"
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I want to give the JBoss folks the benefit of the doubt, and I'm sure many others in the Java/J2EE community want to, too... but they just keep making it so damn hard.
Does that mean he was doing it?
Please help metamoderate.
Looks like Marc has a great handle on things, as usual. And it's just another reason why I love JBoss' stuff so much. I've even mentioned them in my will and offered up my first-born. Oh, and I'm just a user of JBoss' stuff. Not an employee. THIS IS REAL!
I agree, whole-heartedly!
- Marc Fl^H^H Smith
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
Introduction: I've been accused of astroturfing.
Middle: JBoss is great, JBoss rocks, JBoss has great developers
...
JBoss is King, long reign JBoss, love the JBoss.
Conclusion: OK, no more astroturfing.
Not once does he explain why it was done, but then he hardly even touches on the issue.
Perhaps a direct apology would see the $10M VC be yanked from under Fleury's schitzophrenic hands?
How about a summary for those of us who didn't understand a word of that story and can't be bothered to decipher the links? JBoss? Astroturfing? Are we talking about a company that sells lawns here or what?
A quick blurb..
"A "grassroots" action or campaign is one that is started spontaneously, and is largely sustained, by private persons, as opposed to politicians, corporations, or public relations firms; a "grassroots" campaign comes about because of the popular feelings of some mass of people, as opposed to being the creature of the powerful.
"Astroturfing", then, is a campaign crafted by politicians or spin-doctors, but in such a way as to appear it's the result of popular feeling rather than crafty manipulation by political or corporate elites".
Hmmm.
So, would fake posts which detract from a competitor's product be astromudding ?
Like "Open source is a cancer...." etc. ?
I posted something a few months ago about some personal experiences my gf had while working with Mr. Fleury and members of the JBoss team in close contact.
I have to tell you that he and his wife pay very close attention to this board and presumably other sites where their interests are reflected. I know this because the details of my post were soon known to them (under 24 hours), and caused some disarray in her household because her parents are personal friends of the Fleurys.
Basically, a guilt trip was delivered to her to squelch any further negative commentary regarding them. Given my past experience in this regard, I can't help but find the astroturfing semi-admission to be quite credible. Business isn't just business to them, and no tactic is beyond consideration if it furthers their livelihood.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Presidents of countries, companies and other organizations have become fond of "apologizing" and taking "responsibility". But there's no accountability. JBoss's boss has confessed he ran a corporation which astroturfed, and why not? Once caught, their astroturfing was no longer as effective, and more expensive, so of course it'll decrease. But responsibility means response. Where's a real response to the lies spread by his propaganda corps? Running an American corporation, with its fundamental freedom from liability, what responsibility can he actually bear?
--
make install -not war
Quit using such big words that nobody knows what they mean!
Wow...I had no idea Marc Fleury was into open source development!
...decrying astroturfing and the injuries it causes players, so they vowed never to do it again.
"You may have heard about recent charges in online forums that some JBoss employees, including me, were personally involved in anonymous postings on developer sites."
The answer to your question: YES.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Even the apology makes Fleury look bad. Instead of actually admitting that it happened, and apologizing and then promising that it wont happen again, he instead makes a grand gesture of saying that astroturfing is bad and isn't acceptable at JBoss.
Dude, we already knew it was unethical, we didn't need you to tell us. If this stuff was going on in your company then (a) admit it, (b) apologize.
But I'm glad that this whole thing came out in public, because the practice itself and the lame-ass apology speaks volumes about the integrity of the JBoss group.
John.
to not engage in the practice from work, but use your home PC's.
God I wish all you trolls would cop on and start using JBoss to make your coffee, end world hunger, look good at parties........
Close though!
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Yes, folks, it's true. Ever since I started using POPFile I've been surrounded by some of the most beautiful women in the world, and next week I am marrying the Olsen twins. It's all down to POPFile, and my email is sorted automatically!!!
Oops, I guess I should have click the "Post Anonymously" button.
Sometimes you have to admit you've done something stupid outright, which they didn't really do initially.
Kind of a historical trend for JBOSS. I find a lot of what they say misleading. The professional, in "professional open source" must mean something about heavy marketting as in talking a lot of crap weather it's true or not.
Just like the number of downloads as if that's a useful way of determining market share.
Also the big hype over Sun not certifying them. I'm sorry, it takes time and money to go through the certification process.... don't cry poor and then get 10million in VC money. Especially don't make up crap about how Sun doesn't want an open source j2ee server when it's really about money. Sun will certify any one that pays for certification and passes.
Speaking of which.... If they passed I'm sure I would hav eheard about it. Any one know if they ever got certified? Maybe all that yamming about being completely J2EE compliant and Sun just trying to hold them back was just that... talk.
It's a shame. Good idea, good way of implementing it with good training seminars (I hear), but there will be other open source options soon that don't try and diverge away from the J2EE spec like JBOSS does. A free, as in beer, J2EE server is already available that has passed certifiaction testing. Sun's own Sun ONE Application Server 8 Platform Edition is free to download, develop, deploy in production and redistribute. It's really stripped down to make it light and you can really only deploy one instance on it per server but for a lot of people that's enough.
Also, the Apache team has a much better history and more momentum as a whole. Geronimo will really be a big problem for JBoss.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
Is it just me, or does this headling read exactly like the random words in spam designed to bypass spam filters?
Heh... Just an observation. You may now proceed to mod me -1 Offtopic.
I for one commend JBOSS on their excellent decision and look forward to paying for their outstanding consulting and training services in the very near future!
wtf is astroturfing?? Well besides a system to make lawnmowers obsolete
Granted no one would implement a solution without trying it first. However, in all likelihood, they would be more likely to try it in the first place if they had heard someone casually mention it was good in a forum. The problem is that it is often difficult to distinguish against a real unbiased opinion and an astroturfer.
Unknown host pong.
Out of curiosity, what would you have him do? Seppuku? Pay people to download JBoss, instead of giving it away for free? Clean your refrigerator?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Truthfully, how many people had more 1/4 of a clue what this story title meant?
/. before, but it slips my mind as to the exact definition, quick lookup: astroturfing n. The use of paid shills to create the impression of a popular movement, through means like letters to newspapers from soi-disant `concerned citizens', paid opinion pieces, and the formation of grass-roots lobbying groups that are actually funded by a PR group (astroturf is fake grass; hence the term). This term became common among hackers after it came to light in early 1998 that Microsoft had attempted to use such tactics to forestall the U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust action against the company.)
Okay:
JBoss (is Java Server software and a company)
Fleuy (No idea, a guy who works at aforesaid company?)
Abjures (what? is this spelled right? after a quick google/dictionary.com lookup it means: 1. To renounce under oath; forswear. 2. To recant solemnly; repudiate: abjure one's beliefs.)
Astroturfing (ah, I've heard this around
Wow, that was a lot of work and I still can't put it together nor do I care to after all of that work as it seem quite boring anyway. Damn, geek elitiest with your word-of-the-day calendars!
'He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher... or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.' - Douglas Adams
"JBoss's Fleury Abjures Astroturfing"
Man, if I'm going to keep reading Slashdot, I'm going to have to embiggen my vocabulary.
"Derp de derp."
Errr, to elaborate, he did not in fact "apologize" or "take responsibility". I was just curious what additional recompense he was supposed to have made.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
The SGE poster is all but banned from the Beowulf mailing list, but still occasionally get through on the Bioclusters mailing list.
It takes a few postings before you start to wonder why a poster is both posing as a delighted end user and has access to pre-release versions. When you see that they only post about one product, it's pretty clear what is going on.
know as JackAss Boss if you ask me. Did he really mean to say "I won't admit we've done it (even if I may have condoned it), but I won't allow us to do it anymore...."
The app server market is becoming a tight space and it's been hard[er] to make inroads in the enterprise space against the likes of IBM (I'll say BEA as well, but I suspect that Oracle will consume them if they don't do peoplesoft...and being that peoplesoft is ibm friendly, I'd still suspect them [Oracle] to make a bid for BEA, just a thought). Where as IBM can sell the appserver, the iron, and support as a turn key solution, JBoss relies mostly on selling its support and any noise they can make in any forum helps to put them on the radar (however small a blip at this time).
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
For the record, I e-mailed several JBossers on this, and two e-mailed me back. One admitted he'd done it outright and apologized (thank you for that). He claimed he was a lone wolf acting without corporate knowledge; I'm rather suspicious about _that_. The other also admitted he'd did it - and then went on and lambasted me with several pages of abuse, vitriol, and cursing. He danced around the policy issue. By "did it" I mean posting under fake-but-real-seeming names to promote their product, and to simultaneously attack competitors and critics of JBoss alike. The others have not responded. -Mike Spille
than following the law.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
You may have heard about recent charges in online forums that some JBoss employees, including me, were personally involved in anonymous postings on developer sites, which I could deny, but I'll try to save my butt here by confusing you. The practice, known as "astroturfing", is wildly popular on sites like Slashdot that actually let you post as "anonymous coward". We at JBoss know this because everyone does that here. JBoss has the reputation as an in your face, straight up, tell it like it is company were we take advantage of any chance we get to promote ourselves and our products as if we were normal people. I personally don't need a mask to speak my mind and one thing I can't stand is two faced hypocrisy even though I really enjoyed doing it myself. This has made us many friends and a few critics... well ok many critics and little if any friends.
As you may know, the open source community would not be what it is today -- a real challenge to traditional software models -- without the strong opinions and outspoken voices of the developers, developers like us who really enjoy their own voices. I myself am among these wonderful voices. But we do not always see eye to eye on the evolution of the open source movement, especially because most of the open source community doesn't like us anyway. Some prefer subsidized open source, whereby they work corporate jobs and contribute/moonlight on the side without getting a dime for all the sacrifice they put into it. Many others, including us at JBoss, prefer the "Professional Open Source" model, whereby it is our job to work on open source and free software all day long, all the time, while reading Slashdot especially. We all passionately believe in the standalone potential of professional open source. JBoss' growing traction in the enterprise market, our expansion of products and services beyond the original JBoss Application Server and our recent funding from VCs have intensified scrutiny on our community and company, for bad and worse.
JBoss is transitioning as a company to deliver on our commitment to make open source a safe and viable alternative for companies such as yours, which could be our next customer if we could only force you to buy from us. We have hired the most talented developers - many of whom are innovators and lead developers of popular open source projects and can write up to 100 posts a minute. We provide them with the means to continue developing and support these products while creating value for our community and wealth for themselves. As a company we are growing rapidly to meet the expert professional services needs of our customers and partners and even for those who don't give a damn about us. We want to be role models for ALL open source developers around the world. To do so, we must hold ourselves to a higher standard and try not to get caught the next time. Our visibility and success puts our customers and partners in a situation where you expect and demand that employees of JBoss Inc. hold themselves to that higher standard. Let's all put the professional back in professional open source, because it was your fault too if we removed the professional from open source in the first place. "Astroturfing", as we all knew it, is hereby banned at JBoss, starting with me.
Sincerely (most of all),
Marc Fleury
Founder, Chairman and CEO
JBoss, Inc.
diegoT
Step 2. come back here and ask what to do next. There will be more.
Step 3. ????
Step 4. Profit!
You took his name, and found someone else with the same name, and pretended that you thought that they were talking about them!!! AHAHAHAHA that's friggin' priceless man!!
You should have also pretended like you thought they were talking about fake lawn with the "astroturfing" bit too... Classic comedy man, props.
I am real too, and I can testify that it is a very nice product. Much better than the competition :)
If they had used anonymous proxies, there wouldn't have been a problem.
2 years and no mod points. Join reddit. Because openness is good.
Anyone else notice all of the RealNetworks plugs for Helix on newsgroups, message boards, and yes - slashdot?
didn't you just get your girlfriend in trouble again?
I am real, not posting as AC and I can testify that , in my opinion, JBoss is a worthless product. Much worse than the competition...
A question to tehcnical professionals..
When is the last freaking time you actually paid attntion to and responded to any anoynmous poster in any technical disucssion?
sounds of crickets...
This is a non story folks..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
So at this point they have no credibility by trying to weasel out of this like a slimy politician.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
I don't see astroturfing as such a big deal.
Isn't anyone who has contributed to an open source project technically astroturfing when they make pro-open source comments on Slashdot without revealing their participation. Isn't this true of closed source posters as well? Hell, even first-posters have their agenda.
http://efil.blogspot.com/
If so, why is it OK when Guy Kawasaki and the folks at Apple do it, and not OK when JBoss does it? I remember a lot of pleas on the EvangeList to do just the same thing on bulletin boards, etc. One tactic was to encourge people to write to little boutique software shops and encourage them to develop Mac versions. This may cause someone to spend 1000s (or millions) of dollars developing a product that there's no real market for, because the Maccies making the requests have no intention of buying the product.
I also know that Apple employees frequent Slashdot and other forums to "mod" dissenting views down, and talk up their technology.
So why is it OK for Apple to do this and not JBoss?
Best Buy can have you arrested
The practice, known as "astroturfing", is wildly popular on sites like Slashdot that actually let you post as "anonymous coward".
I think it is a different thing to use fake identities in order to make your product look better than it is and discrediting the critics than simply posting as anonymous. Anyone can take comments from an AC with a grain of salt, but occasional readers do not have the capability to understand that a person behind fake identity is essentially fake and astroturfing. I for one only realized what was going on on TSS only after some very specific comments from Cameron Purdy. Just one more reason to support Geronimo or Jonas instead of the "competing" offering from JBoss Group.
Kidding aside, Mr. Cumming, but how about using an unmunged email address here on Slashdot like I do?
My program, CF13, which I use to 'protect' iamcf13@hotpop.com, takes a 'I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!' approach to fighting spam and emailed fraud and malware. It is surprisingly effective!
All the spam I've received since 2004-03-15 08:30:58 UTC has been archived into a single file for easy perusal and deletion. If I wanted to, I could use an even more draconian version of CF13 that would delete most spam at the server level after just analyzing the email headers!
CF13 does not have the overhead or resource consumption that all other Bayesian-ish email filters have.
Rather than 'play games' with spammers, CF13 changes the rules of unsolicited email communications--making it virtually impossible for spammers to successfully deliver their unwanted messages.
As an added benefit, the current SMTP/POP3 email network infrastructure remains intact--making it unecessary to discard it for 'something new and improved' that doesn't have the widespread acceptance and reliability that SMTP/POP3 has.
Me: http://www.cf13.com/ Slashdot: Not newsworthy. You decide. PS: Read first before emailing me.
(Because if you violate CF13's email policy, your email WILL be treated as spam and processed as such.)
There is nothing wrong with astroturfing when what you are saying is true.
JBoss has the best application server on the face of the planet.
They also have the most affordable application server.
He might fire someone, or at least publicly castigate them. Or he might announce some other amending action, like making his astroturfers offer some kind of service, on company time, to the forums they polluted. If he were smart, he'd apologize to the people who run those forums, and offer them JBoss software, or someone else's, and free integration. Then he'd get promotion, too. But what has he done? Nothing, except brag about how outspoken his company's people are.
--
make install -not war
True - the slippery weasel (sorry, not you, "Otter" ;) didn't even explicitly apologize. He just made some excuses for bad behavior, then swore off it, starting with himself, without even offering to make his people stick to that policy. You're right: I was being *too generous* in even saying that he apologized.
--
make install -not war
Doc, you should be running an open source company, not this clown. You got it right, both from a moral standpoint, but from a business standpoint as well. Ethical behavior is such a rarity among corporations and CEOs these days, we get a little hint of it and our intial reaction is praise. But a moment's thought reveals the better solution, both ethically and financially. Yet these cretins in fancy suits can't see past their egos to the obvious choice: admit ya' done wrong, and make it right.
Ya hear me, you Rich, you Powerful, you CEOs and Kings, Politicians and all you Powerful People? And it's not just me here, I'm Channelling the Soul of the Little Guy, so listen up: you can't continue to have power without accountability, but: admit ya' done wrong, and make it right. and we will forgive you, promise.
Please?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
credibility has been lost and once lost it's difficult, if not impossible to get it back regardless of wonderful sounding sweeping statements of apology and so called "we won't do that any more"...
it's even more so in recent time since we've all been lied to, misled, mistreated by just about everyone - governments, corporations, media, people in supposed authority... we just don't trust such statements anymore...
What if I were running a company selling services (not selling software), and I opened the source (eg. published on SourceForge) much of the software we developed for our operations. But I kept back some of the source of the software we distributed to our customers, to keep a competitive edge on our competition. Would that be bad?
--
make install -not war
From Fleury's letter : I personally don't need a mask to speak my mind and one thing I can't stand is two faced hypocrisy
Come on. This guy has been caught astroturfing and his idea of an apology is to deny the obvious and proclaim his distaste of hypocrisy in the same sentence!!!
We knew he was astroturfing, now we know he is a uber-hypocrit and a regular moron too.
That's an excellent example of treating a problem as a potential opportunity to create something positive. Fleury et al did something to degrade not just their own credibility but that of the forums where the astroturf occurred. They did harm to those forums, and the obvious way to atone would be to do something that creates positive value for those who were harmed. Offer to give them free software or services, write some free articles, give them some inside access to information about product roadmaps or benchmarks, pick up part of the bandwidth tab...whatever. That would be true atonement, in contrast to the empty non-apology that was actually offered.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
What are you talking about? Weblogic is the perfect solution for enterprise-class J2EE installations. A professionally-managed implementation of weblogic from BEA Systems will help any business dramatically increase their efficiency, responsiveness, and adaptability. By putting my trust in BEA, my customer service solutions improved by 90% within the first year alone. Thank you BEA Weblogic!
Heh.
The ex-boss at a company i know of was pretty widely thought to have done a bit more than taint the noosphere. These guys at JBoss may know software (1tbs is bad; however), but they make lousy ethics violators.
> what would you have him do? Seppuku?
No, just clearly admit to what he personally did and apologize.
Can you believe this guy? He says things like:
"Some prefer subsidized open source, whereby they work corporate jobs and contribute/moonlight on the side. Many others, including us at JBoss, prefer the 'Professional Open Source' model, whereby it is our job to work on open source and free software all day long, all the time"
How many people does he think he needs to insult to be successful? Those of us who do "moonlight"--are we less professional because we DONATE our time to free software projects? With any luck, guys like this will be ignored, as they deserve to be and the thinly veiled corporate enterprise they try to stick on us will be openly shown to the whole world. Then again, who can believe he has any credibility now?
Is it any surprise that he is a Java guy? He's following in Gosling's footsteps, after all and we all know that RMS wrote the GPL just because Gosling was an ass who wouldn't share back patches on software he got for free.
JBoss--what a bunch of useless cruft. Hey, Marc, enjoy your 15 minutes dude, it seems to mean a lot to you.
I remember back in the BBS days when Microsoft was first caught doing this. It was euphemistically called "Stealth Marketing" at the time.
If JBoss has earned outrage for employing favorite MSFT tactics, then this proves how we continue to hold Open Source to a higher moral standard.
HERE are some misc. references to MSFT astroturfing & shilling:
"I also know that Apple employees frequent Slashdot and other forums to "mod" dissenting views down, and talk up their technology.
So why is it OK for Apple to do this and not JBoss?"
A) You DON'T know this.
B) Because, if conjecture now qualifies as the truth, Microsoft employees frequent Slashdot and other forums to "mod" dissenting views down, and talk up their technology.
C) Because, and this IS the truth, open source zealots frequent Slashdot and other forums to "mod" dissenting views down, and talk up their technology.
You, sir, are a jackass.
I don't use an unmunged email address because then I would receive more spam. I don't want to receive more spam because, even though POPFile is effective at deleting it, not receiving it in the first place is preferable.
I wouldn't be able to use your application because it only works on Windows.
John.
Understood.
But 'munging' is 'giving in' to the spammers and making it difficult for people to contact you via email -- like a CAPTCHA.
'Munging' won't stop 'manual spammers'. I have had in the past one email address posted on a website of mine as a bitmap. That email address still got spammed, either by 'manual spammers' who read and manually added my email address to a spamlist or by a OCR-aware spambot that was able to read my email address imbedded in it (probably possible).
Even the smart spammers could analyze the munging techniques used here on Slashdot and still properly decode munged email addresses insided a spambot they program....
Because spammers are so aggressive and invasive, it seems the only way to keep them out of your email inbox is to make it virtually impossible for spammers to communicate while still making it possible to receive unsolicited email from 'unapproved senders'.